Authors: Tara Altebrando
Because the bartender had shouted across the room. “Hey, Jimmy!”
And Jimmy, with a Guinness at a table in the corner, had said, “Yes, sir!”
“Whatever happened to Danny? You know, the one whose son died?”
“Same as happens to everybody.”
Scarlett had braced for bad news. He was dead, too. The
Wikipedia
page was out of date.
But then Jimmy had said, “Whispering Pines, I think?”
“There you go.” The bartender had knocked on the bar two times with his knuckles.
“Whispering Pines?” Scarlett had repeated.
“Nursing home up the road.”
Relief had mixed with . . . something else.
“How did his son die?” Lucas had asked.
“Brain tumor.” The bartender had put his hands on his hips. “Was dead a year after they found it.” Some head shaking. “Just one of those things.”
“He ever talk about his work?” Lucas had presented the book. “This book?”
The bartender had looked at it. “He wrote this?” A shrug. “Never mentioned it.” Then he’d looked at
them
. “Hey, wait . . . you’re . . .”
Scarlett didn’t want to let go of Lucas’s hand when they got to Tammy’s car, but he let go for her. She unlocked the car and got in.
She didn’t like the idea of trees being able to
w
h
i
s
p
e
r
.
Because what would they say?
I s
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.
I
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b
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ou
.
“Lucas?” She had her hand on the key but couldn’t turn it. “I’m scared.”
That was the something else.
Fear.
“It’s just a nursing home.” He smiled. “Anyone tries to mess with us, we can so totally outrun them.”
“I don’t mean that,” she said.
What
did
she mean?
/
/
/
Hot air balloons.
Swallowed clues.
Old staircases.
Old books.
An unreturned boy.
She didn’t like any of it.
Didn’t like where any of it was heading.
“My mother said the aliens took me because she was a bad parent.”
“You can’t possibly believe—”
“No,” she interrupted. “Of course not. But we were chosen. Right? By someone? Why us?”
“I don’t know. Maybe that was part of it. That we were all in these messed-up families? I just don’t know.”
“So why give us back now?” she asked. “Why is it over?”
“Because we were an experiment like in the book?” he said. “Test subjects? And all experiments have to come to an end, so there can be conclusions to draw.”
“What’s the conclusion?” She started the car. “What did they prove?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out, Scar.”
/
/
/
“You’re the only one who calls me that.”
Then more drops landed and burst on the windshield.
Then slicing rain kicked in, tiny knives attacking the car.
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And in her mind’s eye she saw them together.
Running.
Panting.
Warm.
Wet.
Lucas
Waiting out the downpour, he showed her some of the pictures he’d taken—of Opus 6, of Miranda and Ryan, of nothing at all.
“Wait.” She reached out for the camera, stared at the display. “I remember your brother, I think. From when we were little. I think he was with me when I chipped a tooth once.”
“Yeah? Was I there, too?”
“I don’t remember. And that’s his girlfriend?”
Lucas nodded. Then he leaned back as far as he could toward his door and snapped a photo of Scarlett: her face pale and angular, the raindrops streaking the windows and blurring the world behind her into a fuzzy kaleidoscope of grays and red and blue. The brown of her eyes like wet dirt in spring, almost black.
“Can I see?” she said.
He leaned toward her, their shoulders touching over the console.
“I like it,” she said. “So do you think you used to do this? Take pictures? That that’s what the tattoo has to do with?”
He lifted the camera, looked through the finder. “I held it like this
in the store and the salesperson noticed it and said only people who are like real photographers do that?” He lowered the camera. “So maybe.”
Then he said, “It just feels easy. It feels comfortable. To hold the camera.”
Same way it had to hold the gun.
He had to tell her.
Had to trust her.
Had to trust her to trust him.
He said, “I know how to load a gun.”
“What?” she said. “How did you even figure that out?”
“My father has—had—one and when Ryan showed it to me, I just . . .”
CLICK HISS UP AND
CALM.
“I just picked it up and loaded it. Without even thinking about it.”
She turned away from him and stared at or out the windshield, where rivers and streams were cutting their way down. He thought he saw her hand move to the door handle, thought that maybe if it weren’t pouring she might open the door and run.
“Why would I know how to do that?” he asked, trying to lure her back, trying to make her his ally in this.
“I don’t know,” she said, and it got quiet.
He hadn’t actually realized how loud the rain had been until it stopped.
“Do you think we were trying to escape?” she asked. “Plotting it?”
“It seems like with the penny, and my tattoo, it’s like we knew what was happening, like we knew we were forgetting or were going to forget?”
CAROUSEL.
HORSE.
CLICK. HISS.
SHUTTER. TRIGGER. KISS.
He said, “Maybe we were trying to find ways to remember.”
She took the penny in her hands again, and the sun ripped a seam through the clouds. She started the car.
AVERY
“Any problems at school?” Chambers sounded bored, like this was some run-of-the-mill traffic stop. “Anyone who might be messing with you?”
He and her father were looking at her.
“Me?” Avery was surprised to have the conversation turn to her so quickly. She thought she and Emma and Sam had mostly been kidding around.
“Yes, we know kids can be particularly, well, cruel,” Chambers said. “I wonder if there’s someone with some grudge against you.”
“I’m like one of the most popular people in school,” Avery said.
“I’m serious,” Chambers said.
“So am I.” Avery pushed her shoulders back. “Everybody loves me.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way—but you’re smart, pretty, you have a boyfriend, this house. Seriously, look at you.”
She was fully dressed for the wedding now. Makeup. Hair blown out. Nails done. Heels. A tight purple dress that she wished Lucas could see her in.
“No way everyone loves you.”
“So you’ll go to the school?” her father asked. “Investigate?”
“No,” Chambers said. “We don’t have time for that. You’re going to assume it’s a prank, because it is, and you’re going to ignore it. When we wrap this whole thing up, whoever it is will stop.”
“That’s it?” Avery protested.
“That’s it.”
“But—”
Chambers stopped her with a hand held in front of her. “Do you want me to focus on finding Max or focus on finding some girl with a beef with you who’s laughing about this with her friends?”
“Max,” Avery said. “Of course.”
“Of course,” her father said.
“Good.” Chambers headed for the door.
“Anything from the tip line yet?” Avery asked.
“It’s not even been a full day,” Chambers said. “We have to be patient.”
“I do have one question for
you
,” Chambers said to her father, and they stepped outside and closed the door but not all the way and she moved to try to listen.
“The school shooting,” Chambers said softly, sounding almost confused. “Was Max there that day?”
“With my wife, yes. At an open house.” Her father also sounded confused. “Why do you ask?”
“It’s probably nothing,” Chambers said. “I’ll be in touch.”
Dad poked his head in the door. “Sam’s here.”
She checked herself in the mirror, blinked away sad eyes, and grabbed her clutch.
“Just have fun tonight, okay?” Dad said, kissing her on the forehead at the threshold. And the way he looked at her made her think about this father-daughter dance they’d gone to when she’d been a Girl Scout, how she’d worn a dress from when she’d been a flower girl in her aunt’s
wedding, how she’d had a wrist corsage of glitter-spattered carnations. He still smelled of the same aftershave—the scent of trees she’d never seen and that grew only in rugged mountain terrains.
She almost tripped on the steps on her way out to the car.
Damn heels.
S
c
a
r
l
et
t
It didn’t seem like the worst place to go to die.
Palms and blooming shrubs. Pathways winding down to a park on the waterfront with benches and still more palm trees and a few small fountains—a kneeling stone woman pouring water onto stone flowers from a jug, a small petrified birdbath replete with immobilized birds.
Scarlett imagined herself old, in an Adirondack chair, listening to the fountains’ trickles, then wondered about where this Adirondack chair obsession of hers had come from.
She had parked the car facing the Gulf.
The whole of it was shiny and gray, like dolphin skin.
“What’s our plan?” she asked as they approached the double glass doors of the main building.
“We’re friends of the family,” Lucas said.
“No, really.” She stopped walking.
He stopped, too. “Yes, really.” He tilted his head toward the door in encouragement, totally confident.
But then . . .
/
/
/
/
What if they’d been kept
here
?
The whole place seemed suddenly shadowed in gloom.
Like some light filter had fallen over it.
Every window might have been a room where they’d been locked.
Every person there might have been an accomplice.
They shouldn’t have come. “Scar,” he said, “it’s just a nursing home. We’re just going to try to talk to an old writer.”
“But what if . . .”
/
/
/
“. . . it’s really him?”
“Then we’ll deal with that.” He nodded.
“What if it’s him and we don’t know it?”
“Then we’ll deal with
that
.”
She couldn’t move her feet for a moment.
But knew she . . .
. . . had to.
Inside, the air smelled like lavender bleach, and the floor was so bouncy that she actually looked down to see what she was standing on. It was just carpet but it was padded beyond reason.
No one would ever break a hip here.
A large floral arrangement on the front desk partially explained the scent but also obscured the view of the woman sitting there, so Scarlett and Lucas stepped to the side of it, and Scarlett met the eyes of a middle-aged nurse with short bleached-blond hair. She wore navy-blue scrubs and looked up at them like they were nothing out of the ordinary.
Relief.
Disappointment.
Had Scarlett wanted someone to recognize them?
Wanted alarms to sound?
Gates to drop?
Maybe.
Maybe if it would end the
/
/
/
clicking in her head.
“We’re here to visit Daniel Orlean,” Lucas said.
The nurse looked at him, then at Scarlett, then back at him.
“We’re friends of the family,” he said. “Old friends of his son’s.”
“Oh, just awful,” the nurse said, hand to heart. “What happened to him. Just awful.”
“Yes,” Lucas said. “Truly.”
“So you’re familiar with Danny’s condition, then?” The nurse pushed a sign-in sheet on a clipboard forward, and Scarlett decided to make herself useful. She searched her brain for made-up names and signed them in as Matt Jones and Anne Shepherd.